Role of Social Incentives in PRO Collection

Value-based healthcare is heavily dependent on the accurate measurement of patient outcomes, both immediately after treatment and at long-term intervals. Patient reported outcomes (PROs) are often the central component of any quality improvement process as they are patient centered, reflect the ultimate objective of the intervention and are endorsed by many professional societies as the preferred physician performance metric. Although high response rates are critical to producing reliable data to support value-based payment models, quality improvement, and stakeholder transparency - especially in arthroscopy in which patients often fare well over time and may be less likely to continue with follow-up - response rates to outcome surveys after initial recovery from treatment are consistently below 50%. Monetary incentives offer only minor improvements in response rates against large increases in already rising costs. Individually tailored social incentives - as grounded in current behavioral economic practice - offer a potential cost-effective solution to this problem in Sports Medicine and arthroscopy.

The investigators predict that well-constructed, personal social incentives will increase response rates for long-term follow-up of episodic care compared to control. The investigators predict these rates will vary depending on the patient demographics and other characteristics.